“He who for wolves provides a feast
Seized on the city of the East,
The heathen’s nest; and honour drew,
And gold for gifts, from those he slew.”
LATIN PILGRIMS
After the completion of the new churches, in 1048 A. D., crowds of pilgrims came rejoicing to see them, as Roderick Glaber (“the bald”) relates: “And then from all the world an incredible multitude of men entered Jerusalem, with exultation, bringing gifts for the restoration of the house of God.” Yet earlier, in 1033, he says, “An innumerable multitude began to flow together to the Saviour’s tomb at Jerusalem, whom none might hope to number. First the class of the lower people, then the middle class, afterwards the greatest—kings, counts, and nobles—lastly, which had never happened before, many women, noble and poor, arrived there. Many, indeed, desired at heart to die before they went home.”
Among these pilgrims of high rank was Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou, ancestor of a future king of Jerusalem, who came to expiate many deeds of violence. When he returned he built a church at Loche in imitation of the Sepulchre at Jerusalem. He made two more pilgrimages to the Holy City, and died in 1040 at Metz, returning from the last. Robert of Normandy, father of the Conqueror, also went by the land route to Palestine in 1035 A. D. In Asia Minor he met a Norman pilgrim returning home. Robert was sick, and was carried in a litter by Saracens. He bade his subject tell his barons “that you saw me where I was being borne by devils to Paradise.” Before the gate of Jerusalem he found a crowd of poor pilgrims, denied admission by the Egyptian guard because they could not pay the tax of one aureus each. He paid the gold bezant demanded for every one of them. This munificence of the Norman was well appreciated by the Moslem governor, who sent back the money which Robert distributed among the poor. The duke died on his return journey at Nicæa before reaching Byzantium.
The conversion of the Hungarian Mongols to Latin Christianity, in the end of the tenth century, opened a new safe route to Constantinople. Richard, abbot of St. Vitou in Normandy, led a band of seven hundred pilgrims to Jerusalem; and in 1054 the bishop of Cambray was attended by a great host, who were called “the army of the Lord,” but they only got to Laodicæa in Syria, and then returned home. Four other German bishops were accompanied by seven thousand pilgrims, and Ingulphus, the secretary of William the Conqueror, was among the leaders. They are said to have been served on vessels of gold and silver, and the tents of the bishops were hung with costly tapestry. They were attacked by an Arab sheikh at Ramleh, and were for a time in danger of their lives. But bishop Gunther of Bamburg felled the insolent brigand with one blow, and he was seized and bound. The Egyptian governor hurried to their assistance, and declared the sheikh to be an outlaw of whom the settled population were afraid. The bishops presented the governor with 500 gold bezants (or about £250), and were safely escorted to Jerusalem. They saw the holy places, and Ingulphus went back by sea to Italy. Bishop Gunther died in Hungary, and only two thousand out of seven thousand ever saw their homes again. Of his own comrades Ingulphus says “that they sallied from Normandy thirty stout and well-appointed horsemen, but that they repassed the Alps twenty wretched palmers, with staff in hand and wallet on back.”
Such were the pilgrims who explored the way for the Crusaders half a century before Peter the Hermit. Whether they continued to come in equal numbers after the Turks took Jerusalem in 1077 A. D. is not known, but, as we shall now see, the dangers and difficulties of pilgrimage then became far greater, and a cry of wrath and misery echoed from the Holy City over all the Latin world.